You can’t fix a problem you can’t see…

What our creative and performing sector can learn from a scoreboard it no longer has.

 

Introduction

Let’s get you up to speed…

If you read my annual thought piece from last year (Connecting the Dots Between Talent and Opportunity) you’ll know that I’d spent the better part of two and a half years having conversations with people across Australia’s creative and performing industries.

Over the course of the the last twelve months, developing GigBridge has seen my focus turn more to the needs of musicians, venue owners, and booking agents. Each conversation has added and connected another dot to the overall picture (and product roadmap) that continues to be drawn (and developed).

This year, a few of those dots connected in ways I genuinely didn’t see coming.

The most unexpected came through my work with The Vocal Muster. A remarkable organisation doing brilliant things in the Southern Highlands of NSW. My role there began modestly enough: website maintenance, digital support, the kind of behind-the-scenes work that helps to keep my own existence ticking along. But the more work I was doing for them, the more I found myself listening. Really listening.

Buried amongst the many conversations being had inside The Vocal Muster were the same threads of conversations I was already having inside my own network of contacts. Threads I’d been hearing in past conversations were now surfacing themselves again in new conversations.

Talented emerging performers, driven, and serious about building a career. Finding themselves without the support or guidance to help them understand the business side of what they were trying to do. No guidance on contracts. No help with invoicing. No one to explain how the industry actually works before it works them over. Here, in The Vocal Muster, I found experienced industry professionals who genuinely wanted to give back, but had no way of organising to doing so.

Those threads have been pulled together, and have become the genesis of something new.

Introducing TIGO – aka The Incubator Go-Op…

TIGO will be a not-for-profit organisation, working within a co-operative framework, an incubator providing help and support for emerging and early-career artists, musicians, singers and performers across Australia.

The name is deliberate. Go-Op is a play on Co-Op, but with forward momentum baked in. Every member, whether an industry professional, or an emerging artist, will all hold an equal vote. TIGO is not a service provider with clients. It is a community of people invested in each other’s success.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

The moment TIGO started taking shape, something shifted in how we were thinking about ways to build momentum for Ozstream and GigBridge. For months (okay, years), the conversations inside the Ozstream network had been: How do we build momentum? How do we get this moving? How do we build GigBridge at the same time as establishing ourselves as a social enterprise? How do we get people on board? And, how do we create enough energy to make something real?

Almost overnight, the question flipped, along with the problem we were facing. Okay, this is a new problem. How do I slow momentum down?

If you’ve ever been part of something that suddenly starts moving faster than you expected, you’ll know exactly what that moment feels like. It’s equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.

The temptation is to just hang on and enjoy the ride. The discipline is to pump the brakes long enough to make sure the foundations are solid. Because the higher you build, the further you can fall, and the more those foundations you’re building begin to take on greater significance.

That discipline is where we are with TIGO right now. Our 10 Point Plan has recently been circulated amongst our small group of stakeholders. The structure is being formalised, carefully, and deliberately, because this is the kind of organisation that only works if we’ve engaged the right people, and it’s built on solid foundations from the very beginning.

Meanwhile, GigBridge, has been doing some growing up of its own.

Last year, I spoke about GigBridge as a platform looking for its first wave of early adopters – venues and performers. The product soft-launched as a MVP in early 2025, as you do, we learnt much from that three month period. Whilst GigBridge has been in a state of hiatus following the MVP soft-launch, the product itself has evolved significantly, shaped by something I didn’t fully appreciate when I started: just how important booking agents and managers actually are to the fabric of this industry.

The more conversations I’ve had with the good ones (and there are some genuinely brilliant ones out there) the more I’ve come to understand that the relationship between a great agent and their artists or venues isn’t just transactional. It’s often the difference between a career that flourishes and one that fades.

The good agents and managers are professionals who carry real responsibility, operate with genuine integrity, carry a wealth of expertise, and they deserve to be celebrated and supported alongside everyone else.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing. GigBridge is now being built to support and amplify the agents and managers who are doing right by this industry.

And for those who the industry likes to refer to as gatekeepers, those who treat performers and venues as leverage rather than partners? Well. The beautiful thing about a well-designed platform is that it has a quiet way of making certain business models… redundant.

We’re not here to pick fights. We’re here to build something better. And sometimes, building something better is the most effective response of all.

The aim is for TIGO to become the very first user of GigBridge in 2027. The aim here is to ensure everything is working as intended. And with that milestone reached, GigBridge will be re-launched as a booking platform for everyone in Australia’s Live Music industry. Regardless of whether you’re a performer or a venue, someone who independently manages your own affairs, or prefer to be semi, of fully managed by a strong agent or manager, GigBridge will be able to cater for your needs.

(BTW – At the very end of this piece, you’ll be able to learn more about the survey GigBridge is conducting which is open to all and runs to the end of August.)

All of which brings me – in a rather satisfying full-circle kind of way – to what this year’s piece is actually about.

 

Act One – The Opening Argument

What gets measured gets done…

There’s a tension that lives at the heart of almost every serious conversation about Australia’s creative and performing arts sector. I’m confident you’ll have seen it play out. Maybe you’ve been one of those playing it out and now wear one of those shirts: Been there! Done that!

On one side of the table: the artists, the performers, the creators. The people who got into this because of a feeling – a compulsion, really – that resists any possibility of being reduced to a spreadsheet. The ones who’ll tell you, with complete sincerity, that you can’t put a number on what music does to a room, what live performance does to an audience, what the arts do to a community. And they’re not wrong!

On the other side: the administrators, the funders, the policymakers. The people whose job it is to justify expenditure, demonstrate return on investment, and answer to someone further up the chain who wants to know what all of this is actually worth. The ones who need a number, because without a number, the conversation tends to go nowhere. And they’re not wrong either.

The ABC’s recent series Bad Company captured this push and pull beautifully. The almost gravitational force that pulls creative passion and business pragmatism toward each other, and the spectacular friction that results when they collide. It’s not a new tension. It’s probably as old as the first time someone asked a troubadour for a receipt… Or a refund!

But here’s what I’ve come to believe, after three plus years of conversations and one very deep dive into the statistics that are supposed to describe our industry:

Oh! Those statistics… Yeah, nah, they don’t exist…

What gets measured gets done! What doesn’t get measured, apparently doesn’t exist, and therefore isn’t a problem!

Because if we had reliable, consistent, nationally agreed numbers, if we could actually see the size and shape and health of our industry with any real clarity, then we’d have to confront some uncomfortable truths. About how many performers are not able to earn a sustainable income. About how many venues are genuinely viable in the current economic headwinds. About how many emerging artists make it through their first five years without quietly giving up and going back to do whatever it is they were doing before.

That’s a confronting thought. So instead, we’ve collectively decided, not through any grand conspiracy, but through a thousand small acts of institutional inertia, that it’s easier not to look.

Now, before anyone reaches for their pitchfork: this is not a call to reduce the creative and performing arts to a set of key performance indicators. Nobody is suggesting we start grading concerts on a rubric or assessing poetry collections against quarterly targets. The soul of what we do cannot and should not be flattened into a dashboard.

But there is a vast and important middle ground between “art is beyond measurement” and “here are your KPIs, please sign here.”

That middle ground is called industry statistics. And right now, in Australia’s creative and performing sector, it is essentially a vacant lot.

Okay, so it’s not entirely a vacant lot. There are things slowly beginning to grow. Some are scrappy, others well-intentioned, and occasionally, even brilliant bits of data are finally being collected and are now being reported on. But when you step back, there is nothing that adds up to a clear and coherent picture. Nothing that lets us walk into a room with policymakers, funders, or the general public and say: here is our industry, here is what it contributes, here is what it needs, here is what other countries are doing, and here is how we know it to be true.

Consider this. If you wanted to know how many people are employed in Australia’s live music sector right now, you could find at least four different answers. From four different credible sources. With answers ranging from around 14,000 to over 41,000. Same country. Same sector. Same year. That’s not a rounding error. That’s four different instruments measuring four different things and calling them all the same thing.

Or consider the number of live music venues. Music Victoria identified 2,441 of them in Victoria alone. Sound NSW found 795 establishments offering live music across New South Wales, of which just 55 were considered dedicated. These numbers cannot both be true under any single definition of the word venue. Yet both are cited. Both circulate. Both get used to build cases and support difficult conversations.

And then there’s the pub gig, the bread and butter of the emerging performer’s existence. The Friday night set at the local. The function that pays the rent. The Saturday afternoon in a beer garden that keeps the dream alive for another week. Statistically speaking, most of those gigs don’t exist.

Not because nobody played them. Not because nobody paid them. But because the systems designed to count our industry were never built to see them. The performer gets paid cash or a flat fee invoice. The venue records it against hospitality costs. The booking doesn’t show up in any ticketing system. And so, as far as the official record is concerned, the gig never happened, the performer wasn’t there, and the income – somewhere between $250 and $600 for a night’s work – was never earned.

(I was recently told that clubs are pulling back from putting on live music! Really? How many clubs? Is this a regional thing, or part of a larger trend?)

Most performances, it turns out, are enjoyed in two halves: the half that happens on stage, and the half that disappears entirely from the statistical record.

This is the world we’re operating in. And it raises a question that I think deserves a serious answer: How did we get here?

 

Act Two – The Problem

For those who like to play the long game…

I’ve been playing the long game my whole life. My therapist likes to call it avoidance, whilst I prefer to call it strategy.

Here’s a statistic worth knowing: Australia’s cultural sector has been made to wait since 2014.

Did you know: Australia didn’t always struggle to see its creative and performing sector clearly.

There was a time, not so long ago, when this country had something genuinely world-class. A dedicated statistical infrastructure, built carefully over more than two decades, that gave Australia what was later described as “an enviable international reputation as a world leader in the development of statistical services in the cultural and recreational fields.”

We had the tools. We had the methodology. We had the institutional knowledge and the dedicated people to run it. The Australian Bureau of Statistics maintained a National Centre for Culture and Recreation Statistics (the NCCRS), a specialist unit that had been quietly, diligently doing the work of counting and describing our cultural life since the early 1990s.

Cultural employment data. Audience participation surveys. Children’s engagement with the arts. Household expenditure on culture. A Cultural and Creative Activity Satellite Account that placed our sector alongside tourism and agriculture as something the nation considered worth measuring properly.

We were, by all accounts and international standards, ahead of the game.

And then, in response to something that happened the month before, on the 5th of June 2014, the lights went out.

On that date, the Acting Australian Statistician, Jonathan Palmer, announced that the ABS would discontinue its funded component of Culture, Sport and Recreation statistics. A decision that included the disbanding of the NCCRS. The reason given was the need to reduce ABS expenditure by approximately $50 million over three years. The decision was framed as routine fiscal housekeeping.

For those playing the long game: we only need to cast our minds back to the Abbott/Hockey federal budget handed down the month before. The one that abolished 36 government bodies, cut 16,500 public service jobs, and stripped approximately $87.1 million from the arts portfolio across four years. That budget quietly handed the ABS a set of challenges of its own.

Most departments lost funding but retained their core measurement and statistical functions. The ABS made a specific choice to disband the NCCRS and discontinue cultural statistics entirely. No ideological motive was stated for that last part. None needed to be. When you remove the instruments that measure something, you don’t have to argue about its value anymore. The argument simply becomes impossible to have.

What followed is a matter of public record. Survey after survey, discontinued. Data series after data series, orphaned. The Cultural Funding by Government series, a continuous annual record stretching back to 1994, developed permanent holes where entire financial years simply weren’t collected. The Employment in Culture series, gone. The Children’s Participation in Cultural Activities series, gone. The General Social Survey’s arts modules, stripped out. The ABS’s pilot UNESCO Cultural Employment Survey, abandoned before it had a chance to begin.

In a single budget cycle, we set off down the path of dismantling twenty years of carefully constructed cultural measurement infrastructure.

Even the Acting Statistician, to his credit, was direct about what it meant. If funding were provided for the work being ceased, he said, it would be reinstated. Sadly, it hasn’t been.

Now here’s where it gets instructive. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. And so does an industry that still needs to make its case to governments, grant applications, funders, and the public.

What grew in place of the NCCRS wasn’t nothing. It was something considerably more complicated than nothing. A patchwork. A parallel ecology of philanthropic think tanks, university research units, industry bodies, and peak organisations. Each doing genuinely valuable and meaningful work. Each measuring a different slice of the same elephant. None of them quite able to agree on how big the elephant actually is.

A New Approach, a philanthropic-backed policy institute, has stepped into the gap and began publishing its own Big Picture data series. The Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research picked up the orphaned Satellite Account work and began rebuilding it from scratch, finally releasing a substantially refreshed methodology in December 2024. Creative Australia now runs participation surveys, audience tracking, and hosts Music Australia, which published its first comprehensive economic study of the Australian music industry in 2025.

These are all good things. Genuinely important contributions made by people who care deeply about this sector.

But here’s the problem.

Because the floor was removed and the rebuild was left to goodwill, the numbers that now circulate through our advocacy, our grant applications, our media coverage and our policy submissions don’t always agree with each other. They don’t always measure the same things. And most people using them have no idea.

The Gross Value Add (GVA) figure for Australia’s cultural and creative sector? Depending on which source you use and which methodology you apply, you’ll find estimates ranging from $67.4 billion to $111 billion. Both figures still circulate in advocacy materials. Sometimes in the same document. Both are cited with equal confidence.

The number of musicians employed in Australia? The ABS Census, counting main-job musicians only, captures a fraction of the total, a few thousand people for whom music is their primary declared occupation. The Throsby Artists as Workers study estimates between 42,000 and 53,000 practising professional artists across all art forms. The Creative Trident analysis of the same Census data finds 714,632 people working in the creative economy. APRA AMCOS counts 128,000+ songwriter and composer members across Australasia.

One country. One sector. Four numbers. All technically defensible. None of them the same.

And underneath all of it (invisible to almost every instrument, uncounted by almost every methodology) is the performer who played three pub gigs last weekend, got paid cash, and yet, statistically speaking, didn’t actually work at all.

The Census asked them what their main job was. They might have said teacher, or bartender, or delivery driver. Because that’s where the regular income comes from. Their music or talent, the thing they’re actually building toward, the career they’re genuinely trying to create, that doesn’t get a column.

BCARR, to their considerable credit, acknowledged this directly in their December 2025 workforce report: “a singer who also works in a club – the estimates can identify that this secondary job is in the pub/club industry, but cannot identify the singing job.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The system designed to count our workforce cannot identify the singing job. The thing that defines the person. The thing they’ve spent years developing. The course they’ve spent four years studying. The thing the industry runs on. Invisible. Uncounted. Apparently non-existent, and therefore not a problem.

The researchers at the University of Canberra are working on it. Their Beyond the Census project, funded specifically in response to the acknowledged gap, is attempting to capture what official statistics cannot. (Final report due: 2027 to 2028!)

In the meantime, we continue to make our case with the instruments we have. Knowing that the most important parts of our story, the grassroots, the emerging, the pub-and-club, the cash-in-hand, the performer who hasn’t yet crossed whatever invisible threshold qualifies them as real, are the parts the instruments were never built to see.

This is not incompetence. The people building these instruments are skilled, dedicated, and working within genuine constraints. The problem is structural. Each instrument was built for a different purpose, for royalty distribution, ticket levy compliance, GDP accounting, copyright enforcement, and none of them were built to count, value, or track the journey of an emerging Australian performer from their first gig to a sustainable career.

So. We have data collected for the wrong purpose. Yes, and no. A measurement infrastructure that was world-class, then reduced, then partially rebuilt on philanthropic goodwill. Numbers that contradict each other not because anyone is lying, but because they’re measuring different things and we’ve stopped being careful about saying so.

My friends, that’s where we are, maths is all about the numbers you choose to use. The good news is, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

 

Act Three – The Solution

Who decided sport and the arts belong at opposite ends of the spectrum…

When was the last time you watched a sporting event and someone suggested that keeping score was somehow missing the point? That the scoreboard was a threat to the purity of the game? That measuring wins, losses, player statistics, and team performance was somehow reducing sport to something cold and administrative?

Never. Obviously never. Because in sport, the scoreboard isn’t the enemy of the game. The scoreboard is the game. It’s how we understand what we’re watching. It’s how players know where they stand. It’s what the commentators comment on. It’s how clubs attract investment. It’s how athletes build careers. It’s how coaches make decisions. And it’s how the whole extraordinary ecosystem sustains itself year after year.

Sorry, I’ve mentioned sports. I see a few of you nodding off. Let’s embark on a side quest!

Pick any sport. Any sport at all. Finland’s wife carrying championships, or the annual cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire, England. Or my personal crazy-favourite being curling, where four players slide a 20kg granite stone down a sheet of ice toward a target, while two teammates sprint alongside it frantically sweeping the ice with brooms to influence its path. Strategy, they’ll tell you. It’s all about strategy.

Curling has a World Championship. A World Junior Championship. A World Mixed Doubles Championship. A World Senior Championship. Its own governing body, the World Curling Federation, with 74 member associations. Annual participation data. Economic contribution reports. Broadcast rights deals.

Australia has four locations where you can play curling. And no dedicated curling facility to speak of. The Australian national championships are held in New Zealand.

And yet, we still know more about the health and trajectory of Australian curling than we do about the thousands of emerging performers playing your local pub every Friday night.

The Australian Sports Commission runs AusPlay. A nationally consistent, annually updated survey of sports participation across the country. Every major sporting code has its own economic contribution report, its own participation data, its own audience metrics. The AFL, Cricket Australia, Football Australia, they don’t wait for the government to count their industry for them. They commission the research, publish the findings, and use the numbers to make their case, attract their partners, and grow their game.

Ok, side quest over!

Now here’s something that might surprise you. If you were to strip away the jerseys and the scoreboards and look at the underlying structure, sport and the creative and performing arts have a remarkable amount in common.

Both are built on practice, and nurturing an individual’s talent, a skill that takes years to develop. Both depend on live audiences showing up in person. Both face the Baumol effect, the fundamental economic reality that a jazz quartet takes four musicians whether they’re playing to twenty people or two thousand. Both rely on a pipeline of emerging performers working their way up through grassroots venues before reaching the larger stages. Both suffer when that pipeline dries up. Both generate enormous cultural value that extends far beyond whatever shows up on a balance sheet.

And yet. Someone, at some point, made a decision to resource the measurement of these two sectors very differently. To treat one as something the nation needed to understand, and the other as something that could largely look after itself.

The result, in 2026, is that we can tell you how many Australians played golf last year. We have a good idea for which age groups are taking up netball. With some precision, the economic contribution of the horse racing industry to regional Queensland. And yet, we cannot tell you, with any confidence, how many emerging performers are actively working in Australia’s live music scene, what they earn, how they got paid, or whether that number is going up or down.

This is not an argument about which sector deserves more. It is an observation about what happens when one sector decides it’s worth counting itself against another sector that hasn’t quite got there yet.

The good news, and there is genuinely good news here, is that we don’t need to start from scratch. We don’t need a royal commission, a new government agency, or a decade-long research programme. We simply need to look at what already works and ask ourselves honestly whether we’re willing to do something similar.

We need to make the numbers count.

These are not enormous programmes, nor are they wildly expensive. They’re acts of collective will, decisions made by industries that decided they were worth counting, and organised themselves accordingly.

Australia’s music industry took a significant step in June 2025, when Music Australia published The Bass Line, the first comprehensive economic study of the Australian music industry, valuing it at $8.78 billion in revenue, $2.82 billion in GVA, and $975 million in exports for 2023–24. That is a landmark piece of work, and the people behind it deserve enormous credit. The second edition, published in May 2026, has already updated those figures, the industry has grown to $10.76 billion in revenue and $4.28 billion in GVA for 2024–25. One report is a milestone. Two reports in consecutive years is the beginning of a system. That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about.

A system requires consistency. Annual cadence. Agreed methodology. And – critically, it requires that the parts of our industry that currently fall through every gap finally get counted.

The emerging performer. The pub gig. The cash invoice. The singer whose main job is officially something else.

None of this requires imposing KPIs on artists. None of it requires reducing creative work to a dashboard. It requires something far simpler and far more achievable: a common language. A shared scoreboard. The kind of basic infrastructure that allows an industry to understand itself, make its case, and grow with intention rather than just hope.

And this is where I want to be direct about what GigBridge is, in the context of this larger conversation.

GigBridge is a live music booking marketplace. But every booking that flows through it, every connection made between a performer, a venue, and an agent, they’re also important data points. A real transaction, in the real economy, involving real people doing real creative work that currently goes largely uncounted. Over time, that data builds into something genuinely useful. Not just for Ozstream, but for the sector as a whole.

We’re not claiming to solve the measurement problem. We’re claiming to be one small, deliberate contribution to it. And we think that every organisation in this sector that takes measurement seriously – that adds its own careful, methodologically honest data to the shared evidence base – is doing something important.

A sector that can see itself clearly is the sector that can advocate for itself effectively. And a sector that can advocate for itself effectively is the sector that, eventually, gets treated with the respect it deserves.

 

Act Four – My Final Thoughts

The dots are there…

We just need to count them…

I want to see our industry enjoying the same respect that sport enjoys. We’ll never get there if we can’t see the small things we have influence over.

Here’s the thing about the performers who leave this industry. Most of them don’t leave because they weren’t talented enough. They’re leaving because nobody is counting them. Because the systems that were supposed to describe their work couldn’t see them. Because the evidence base that might have made the case for their support didn’t exist, or contradicted itself, or measured something adjacent to their reality but never quite their reality itself.

A problem you can’t see is, by definition, a problem you can’t fix.

I want to see Australia’s creative and performing sector enjoying the same standing, the same respect, and the same serious institutional attention that we give to sport.

We’ve earned it. The contribution we make, to culture, to community, to the national identity that Australians actually live rather than just perform for tourists, is every bit as significant as what happens out on a field.

But we are never going to get there if we can’t see the small things we have agency and influence over. The things that don’t require a government programme or a philanthropic foundation or a decade-long research project. The things we can choose to do differently, starting now, because we’ve decided that our industry is worth understanding.

Count the gigs. Record the transactions. Know the demographics. Speak to your network. Agree on what we mean when we say venue and performer and emerging and employed. Build the shared language. Contribute to the evidence base. Show up to the consultations. Create numbers that hold up to scrutiny.

(On that point, the next National Cultural Policy consultation is open right now!) 

None of this is glamorous work. But it is the work that makes all the other work possible.

Which brings me to one small, practical thing you can do today.

To ensure we’re on the right path, GigBridge is currently running a Discovery Survey, and I’d genuinely love your input. Whether you’re a performer, a venue, or an agent or manager, this survey is our reality check. We’ve spent significant time mapping out platform features and booking workflows, but none of that work means anything if it doesn’t reflect what people in this industry actually need. The survey takes less than five minutes, it’s segmented so you only answer questions relevant to your role, and your responses will directly shape what we build and in what order we build it. You’ll find it at GigBridge.com.au.

If last year’s piece was about connecting the dots, then this year’s is about something that has to come before the dots can mean anything. First, we have to be able to see the dots!

The future of Australia’s creative and performing sector isn’t predetermined. It’s something we’re building, together, carefully, with better tools and clearer eyes than we’ve had before.

If our scoreboard is blank, then let’s start adding to the score!

I’ll close with this pearl of wisdom: “In God we trust. All others must bring data!”